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Susan Ohmer was raised to work. She learned what it meant to work hard early in life, so the idea of taking months off work for a sabbatical is truly foreign to her. As the executive director for Petersburg Mental Health, Ohmer was recently chosen as one of six Alaska nonprofit executives to be recognized by the Rasmuson Foundation Sabbatical Program. "It still doesn't seem like it could happen, like it's real," she says. "It's ironic that I'm someone who for 23 years has had difficulty taking...
WRANGELL – Alaska’s 30th Legislature convened for its new session on Tuesday, with the state’s finances presenting a daunting challenge for the next 90 days. The spending deficit is projected at around $3.1 billion this year if the budget is left as-is. Agency spending has come to just over 13-percent since FY15, and the budget as a whole has taken a 29-percent cut when capital projects and other funding is considered. Revenue has failed to cover operating expenses since FY13, but has covered an ever-dwindling proportion since. This year the $...
WRANGELL – Wrangell has narrowed the field for its new borough manager, with city staff and members of the Borough Assembly holding a teleconference with five candidates during a closed-door meeting Friday. Current manager Jeff Jabusch announced his plans to retire back in September, which is to take effect at the end of day March 31. In his current post since 2013, the move brings to a close four decades of employment with the city, much which was spent as its finance director. The Assembly a...
ANCHORAGE (AP) – The state of Alaska on Friday sued two federal agencies to overturn a ban on certain hunting techniques on national refuges and preserves, including the killing of black bear sows and their cubs in dens with the aid of artificial light. The state also wants the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to allow the hunting of black bears and grizzly bears, also known as brown bears, over bait. Gov. Bill Walker, an independent, said in an announcement that Alaskans, especially rural residents, rely on h...
The state has so far not received any applications from a number of floathouse owners contacted last autumn. Since October, the Department of Natural Resources has been reaching out to identified owners of floating facilities anchored along the Stikine River’s tidal area, the land which is under its clear jurisdiction after resolving a longstanding dispute with the United States Forest Service last March. The floathouses being targeted are those anchored within the tidal influence of the river, which ends just beyond the terminus of Shakes S...
The Petersburg school board met Tuesday night to discuss the loss of federal secure rural school funding due to the program seemingly ending in 2017. Board president Sarah Holmgrain said the program has not been funded on a federal level beyond this year, and the school district stands to take a significant hit for the change. In 2015, Congress re-authorized the funding through the current year; however, the discussion going forward for Petersburg will be how the district learns to live without. The school receives about $600,000 from secure...
An application for an Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) permit alteration to release 40 million chum salmon in Thomas Bay brought forth by the Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association (NSRAA) has been approved. The application process has taken just over a year to secure the location, north of Petersburg, for the release but the change is something NSRAA general manager Steve Reifenstuhl has been thinking about for a while now. “I looked at Thomas Bay approximately 20 years,” he says. “Had temperature probes out there to ev...
Brian Lynch didn't have to hike up Petersburg Mountain or go aboard a vessel in search of his photo "BW" that was recently selected for an exhibition dedicated to flowers. All the local photographer had to do was go out to the garden and look over by the wood shed. "I was out there playing around and this was out there," he says. "I flipped my camera so it was on monochrome because I had decided to do it in black and white." He saved the photo and gave it a "goofy name" then kind of forgot...
JUNEAU (AP) – Bills that would restore the portion of Alaskans’ oil wealth checks that were cut by Gov. Bill Walker last year were filed Monday, ahead of the start of the new legislative session. The legislation to restore dividends was proposed by Republican Sen. Mike Dunleavy of Wasilla and incoming Republican Rep. David Eastman of Wasilla. Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski of Anchorage revived a proposal he has pushed previously with little success which he said would enshrine the current dividend formula in the state Constitution. The Ala...
We were warned that power to a 200 amp electrical service panel would eventually fail, so we planned to upgrade when we resurface the parking lot next to The Pilot next summer. On Monday, Murphy’s Law #3 seemed applicable. “If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will go wrong is the one that will cause the most damage.” On possibly the coldest night of the year, power to the newspaper pressroom failed. That power failure put two of the four heat pumps providing heat to our buildings, out of service. The tempe...
Last week’s page one photo was provided by Jean Curry. The photo credit was not correctly stated....
A mechanical delay and lost luggage put former Petersburg mayor Dave Carlson and wife Celia at the Fort Lauderdale airport just minutes before shooting broke out in Terminal 2 baggage claim area on Friday. The Carlsons left their Bend, Oregon home for a 10-day cruise aboard the Harmony of the Seas, 6,000 passenger cruise ship destined for the Caribbean. A mechanical put them in Ft. Lauderdale 6 hours late, without their luggage. They were told Friday morning that American Airlines had...
JUNEAU (AP) – Canadian officials say they will take action to prevent polluted water from a decades-old mine from entering the Taku River, a key source of salmon caught in southeast Alaska. British Columbia Ministry of Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett told CoastAlaska News experts will explore different options, including plugging leaking tunnels from the defunct Tulsequah Chief Mine. The acidic water has been carrying pollutants into the Tulsequah River, which is a tributary of the Taku near Juneau. The mine hasn’t operated since 195...
KETCHIKAN (AP) – State analysts predict Alaska will lose thousands of jobs this year as it continues to deal with the effects of low oil prices. The Alaska Department of Labor estimates the state will lose about 7,500 jobs in 2017, a little more than 2 percent of its total workforce, The Ketchikan Daily News reported. Economist Caroline Shultz said in the state’s annual job forecast report that there will be widespread reductions in service industries that rely on consumer spending. Alaskans will hold on to more of their dollars this year bec...
A mechanical delay and lost luggage put former Petersburg mayor Dave Carlson and wife Celia at the Fort Lauderdale airport just minutes before shooting broke out in Terminal 2 baggage claim area on Friday. The Carlsons left their Bend, Oregon home for a 10-day cruise aboard the Harmony of the Seas, 6,000 passenger cruise ship destined for the Caribbean. A mechanical put them in Ft. Lauderdale 6 hours late, without their luggage. They were told Friday morning that American Airlines had... Full story
Paving proposal unanimously The Petersburg Borough Assembly passed a resolution Tuesday to approve a program known as a local improvement district or LID. The program is taking a private approach to funding paving improvements in a select number of neighborhoods around town. Public Works director Karl Hagerman gave details about the program at the assembly’s last meeting and assembly members asked for a resolution prior to granting any approval. The time also allowed assembly members to learn more about LID and why Hagerman was so passionate a...
January Public Works rolled out the borough's highly anticipated blue cart recycling program. The borough received $820,117.61 from the annual raw fish tax. Dave Zimmerman was hired as the new Tongass National Forest Petersburg District Ranger. The assembly continued discussing the reallocation of the Kake access road funding. Representative Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins took part in a budget crisis presentation at Sons of Norway Hall. The visit was the first of many by representatives throughout the...
Borough finance director Jody Tow recently had a small scare concerning the annual fish tax the borough receives from the state. The original figure the state gave Tow was $336,847, which would have been the lowest in 15 years, but after reaching out for confirmation she was told the figure was only half of what Petersburg would receive. Tow said the borough will receive almost $337,000 as an initial payment, then get an additional $327,000 due to a timing issue with the state’s fiscal year cut off. If it wasn’t a scare for Tow, it was def...
The borough assembly held its first meeting of 2017 on Tuesday, and had a somewhat full slate on the agenda including a noncompliance hearing of an order to vacate and repair or demolish a dangerous building at 510 Lumber St. Borough building official Joe Bertagnoli and Power and Light electrician Gary Morgan gave oral and written evidence documenting the dangers at the location. Both borough employees said multiple attempts have been made to bypass the borough’s efforts to keep people out of the property by diverting power. The location is u...
JUNEAU (AP) – Attorneys want a federal judge to halt temporarily proceedings in a long-running legal dispute between the group behind the proposed Pebble Mine project and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The motion, made by attorneys for the EPA and Pebble Limited Partnership on Friday, asks that proceedings in the case be halted until March 20, at which time the parties would jointly propose how they wish to move forward. The motion states the two sides have been talking since August about ways to resolve the case. Pebble has a...
WRANGELL – A lifelong Wrangell resident, Lawrence Bahovec, celebrated his 100th birthday this week. Asked how he felt about reaching the milestone, he joked: "It makes me feel old." He was born in Chicago on January 4, 1917. Alaska and Hawaii both were still territories at the time, the United States had not yet joined into the fighting alongside the Allied Powers during the Great War, and Wrangell was still very much a frontier town on the nation's periphery. At a very young age, Bahovec was...
ANCHORAGE (AP) – A union representing nearly 8,000 state employees has filed a complaint against Gov. Bill Walker and his administration for an alleged violation of contract. The Alaska State Employees Association filed the class-action grievance Tuesday in response to Walker’s recently announced budget plan for next fiscal year. The union takes issue with a part of the plan that calls for downsizing Department of Transportation staff and privatizing the majority of the agency’s design team. The grievance says plans to privatize union membe...
WRANGELL – Wrangell's second-largest travel lodging has been sold, and will be repurposed as a senior housing and assisted living center this spring. The owners of the Sourdough Lodge sold the property to a group of buyers, who are currently renovating its rooms and preparing it for the new use. Once completed, by April 1 the lodge will be rechristened Harbor House Assisted Living Center and Senior Housing. One of the buyers, Shannon Bosdell, explained the facility will fill a need in the com...
Last week’s story on the Salvation Army Christmas collections stated the collections were $17,000 under the amount budgeted for the event. $17,000 was the target goal for the Christmas Season collections....
PETERSBURG (AP) – The U.S. Forest Service is moving forward with a project to restore a stream south of Petersburg. Ohmer Creek has been damaged by decades-old logging and road-building where it crosses under Mitkof Highway about 21 miles south of Petersburg. During construction of the roadway in 1959 and 1960, trees were cut from about 20 acres around the stream, leaving a swath of the creek where heavy rains can erode the banks, KFSK-FM reported. Forest Service hydrologist Heath Whitacre said the project is planning to add wood, create new s...
